When comparing Racket vs DM, the Slant community recommends Racket for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?”Racket is ranked 2nd while DM is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Racket is:

Pros

Pro

Free Resources to Learn

Includes several free online books and great documentation.

Pro

Racket was designed to teach functional programming from the start

Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets)Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up.

Pro

Realm of Racket is an excellent entry-level guidebook

Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.

Pro

Easily embeddable

Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed.

Pro

Great RPEL IDEA included Dr. Racket

Pro

Active community

Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.

Pro

Active development

DM and BYOND are constantly being developed and expanded, with feedback from the community, and Lummox as the lead developer.

Pro

Active community

The BYOND community is helpful, and has been active for decades, so there are many solutions available. You can find many answers in the forums.